Introduction to HealthQuake

Those of you that know me will have noticed that I haven’t produced my own blog for a while. This is because about a year ago I decided to go from a horizontal involvement in technology startups to a vertical one focusing on digital Health. Why the change?

For ten years I was heavily involved in the Shoreditch startup scene in London. The area is a hotbed of startup activity across numerous sectors; fintech, fashtech, edtech, proptech, and many other techs. About 18 months ago I sensed that the market was changing. The low hanging fruit of the internet had been picked. There was little room for another Uber, Airbnb or Just Eat. However, there was now an opportunity to address some really meaningful challenges such as health and education using rapidly advancing technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and robotics.

I believe that the UK is in a great position to be a major player in digital health and that the revolution would not be centred around Shoreditch. Many of the building blocks for the new eco-system were based around Kings Cross, also known as the Knowledge Quarter. Organisations such as Deepmind, Wellcome Trust, Crick Institute, Turing Institute and UCL are all based in The Quarter which also has excellent links to the rest of the Oxford/Cambridge golden triangle and the rest of Europe beyond.

As a great believer that startups need strong eco-systems to thrive, I set out to build HealthQuake and a number of other initiatives that I will discuss in what I hope will become a regular blog.

HealthQuake is a community to support digital health startups. I am working with Kateryna Portmann to build a strong programme of events to bring together the movers and shakers in the community. We need data scientists, life scientists, VCs and angels, corporate health professionals and big pharma to help us in our quest to transform health using advanced technology. If you are interested in joining us please reach out to me on paul.dowling@dreamstake.net.